The Profit and Loss report, also called an income and expense statement, sets your sales against your costs, month by month, for a quarter, a half year or a full year. Business owners and finance managers use it to see whether the business made money in a period, and where the money went.
Open the report
Go to Reports in the left menu. On the Standard tab, click Profit & Loss in the Finance group. You can also type "profit" into Search to find it.
Click the report to open it. The parameters are in the panel on the right. Change them, then click Preview to run the report again.
Choose what to include
- Period: how many months the report covers. Choose Quarterly (3 months, the default), Semi Annually (6 months) or Annually (12 months).
- Ending: the last month in the report. The default is December.
- Year: the year of that last month. It starts as the current year. For example, Ending June with Year 2026 makes June 2026 the last month shown. With the defaults, the report shows October to December of the current year. Earlier in the year, set Ending to the current month to see the latest months.
- Revenue: how sales are dated.
- Invoiced (the default) counts sales on the invoice date, whether they're paid or not.
- Cash Collected counts sales on the date a payment is made towards an invoice.
Read the report
The heading shows Profit and Loss with your account currency code, your company name and the period, such as "Quarter ending December, 2026". Each month has its own column, followed by a Total column.
Row | What it shows |
|---|---|
Sales | Your sales for each month before tax, dated by the Revenue setting. With Invoiced, that's your invoices minus credit notes, leaving out draft and voided invoices. With Cash Collected, it's the payments received towards invoices. It sits under the Income heading. |
Cost of Goods Sold | Expenses that you put on a client invoice, before tax, in the month of the expense date. |
GROSS PROFIT | Sales minus cost of goods sold. |
Less Expenses | Your other expenses (not on an invoice), before tax, one row per expense category, with a Total Expenses line. Draft expenses are left out. |
Less Bills | Your supplier bills before tax, by bill date. Draft and voided bills are left out. |
NET PROFIT | GROSS PROFIT minus Total Expenses and Less Bills. |
The Revenue setting only changes Sales. Expenses and bills are always counted in the month of their own date.
The notes at the foot of each page repeat how the Revenue setting and Cost of Goods Sold work.
All amounts are in your account currency. Invoices, expenses and bills in other currencies are converted: see currency conversion in reports.
To see revenue per customer instead, use the Revenue by Month report. For the tax side of the same transactions, use the Tax Summary report.
Save, schedule or export
To keep your parameter choices, save the report as your own copy: see saving and sharing reports. On a paid plan, a saved report can be emailed on a schedule, for example at the start of each month: see scheduling reports for email delivery. Administrators can add other team members as subscribers. To download the report as a file, see exporting data.
Who can see it
Finance reports are available to Administrators and Finance Managers. If you can't find the report, ask an Administrator to add the Finance Manager role under Assign Roles on your contact record. See managing users and contacts.